First thing this morning, I went for a run along the seafront. In the past few, frosty mornings I have seen some wonderful sunrises…yet I wasn’t expecting the sight that greeted me this morning. It was less a sight, more an invite. I felt like I was standing on a threshold, in front a strip of orange light that was reminiscent of a letter box; one that invited posting one’s self through, and who knows what happened then. A fantasy that self would dissolve. A friend and colleague has been telling me of her recent early morning swims. We agreed that such times and place are liminal: to be both this side and the other. We shared photos – she in Brighton, me in Eastbourne – a long strip of orange light connecting us, connecting through to the other side. “This all sounds very William Blake” I joked.
The Celtics Christians would call these thin places: “those rare locales where the distance between heaven and Earth collapses”, as Eric Weiner puts it in his spirituality travelogue, Man Seeks God. They’ve been called “the places in the world where the walls are weak”, where another dimension seems nearer than usual. I get a sense things are thinner still this time of year. Maybe its the light that is cast by a sun lower to the horizon and for lesser time each day; the winter solstice telling us the Earth’s axial tilt positions the northern hemisphere at its furthest point from the sun. And Pagan tradition knows the significance of such a turning point.
Certainly, the festive season – whatever, whichever is being celebrated – brings an opportunity to stand astride the threshold. Janus stands with his head looking back, looking forward. The new year might be somewhat arbitary, but the Gregorian calendar withstanding, winter generally is a time of entering another mode; wintering, hibernating…or the invitation to, at least. I feel fortunate that my life doesn’t carry the expectation of big family Christmas events; and that I have been able to use the festive season to turn inward. I found my own “thin space”; the quiet and withdrawal allowing process to come through and surface. I use the opportunity for solitude each year to complete my end of year review (now in my 13th of using the same prompts and process). This time around, the process emphasised the transition, or bardo transition, I find myself in, having finished Ngondro and contemplating my commencement of the main Yidam practice of the Vajrayana.
Looking back over 2024, looking ahead to 2025: like Janus, I sat on the threshold. Looking in, looking out: another dimension. Back and forth, in and out. It evokes, as is common these days, the movement of the murmuration. On my first day back at work, I committed to walking down to the seafront in Brighton to see if I could catch the starlings doing their thing. I was fortunate. I know this sight is becoming rarer – yet they still raised a mini-murmur for me, a whisper of up / down, back / forth, in / out. Very moving, in all sorts of ways. I could sense their gathering: a ritual marking their own threshold. Their movement (out there), touched the moving (in here): and in their sweeping and swirling I felt a non-separation, “same same” as my meditation mentor called it.
I expected coming out of Ngondro to bring a big celebratory experience; I was not / am not, in a hurry to move on. After getting back from the solitary retreat that brought the five year intensive to a close, I was looking forward to “just meditating”*. I was expecting relief; and yet the clear cut path of Ngondro has opened into a vast, open field…where the path feels both no-thing and every-thing at once. It has brought intense experience. It is funny to think of and feel into the paradox here – in so many ways, stepping off for a while was going to bring less pressure; I was to be luxuriating in less practice time, more time for “me”. The Vajrayana had other ideas – stepping off was in fact a leaping into no-thing-ness with all its terror and loneliness.
Over the Christmas break, I stockpiled many books – each year it the break is an opportunity to catch up and diversify my reading diet. I got my teeth into Orbital, the Booker Prize winner by Samantha Harvey. Of course though…this was not to be a break, this was to ADD to my “in a spin” Vajrayana world. Just like my ongoing dance with the dialectics in the Humanistic tradition, Harvey’s story of astronauts orbiting Earth was inviting me to question the dichotomies and dualities we so often consider as ‘fact’. If I may, let me share an extended quote from a scene where the astronauts are somersaulting, and in allowing their minds to follow, they…
“remembered with a fresh wave of comprehension that they were falling. They were weightless not through lack of gravity – there’s plenty of gravity here, so close to earth – but because they were in a constant state of free fall. They were not flying, but fall-ing. Falling at over seventeen thousand miles an hour. Never crashing of course; they could see what had only been theoretical before, that the earth was curving away from the hurtling free-falling craft at the exact rate the craft was travelling, so that the two could never collide. A game of cat and mouse. They inside, weightless in the sense that you’re weightless for a moment on a plunging roller coaster. Working, running, sleeping, eating in a constant state of plummet. They inside making somersaults backwards and forwards, because sometimes that’s the only thing to do when you’re falling and falling around the earth” (pg 108 / 09)**
We forget we are always falling. We try to find ground by applying ‘this and that’, ‘right and wrong’, ‘up and down’. Dichotomies, polarities, opposites DO give us reference points – but we confuse them for objective fact. Our friends in the southern hemisphere are upside down (to us at least), but who is to say who is falling up or down (a reference to one of my favourite, all time books “Falling upward” by Richard Rohr).
The Vajrayana, like other great mystical traditions, invites the dance between. Not to solve or bring balance: but to be able to stay with the tension of opposites. Like I have been sharing in past weeks, this invite is also there in the existential-phenomenology underpinning the humanistic therapy tradition.
And this is not an intellectual task. I met with my meditation mentor yesterday. I have often experienced an anxiety ahead of our time together: an experience that often puzzles me given the closeness we share. Yesterday however, as I was sitting – coffee in hand – looking out at the trees and skyline visible from my study, I realised perhaps for the first time that much of that anxiety is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Or more accurately, trying to create a linear storyboard to share what has been (and increasingly more so since commencing on the Vajrayana) something quite back and forth, up and down. I wrote in my journal..
“Straight lines are not as wise as circles; even wiser is the infinity loop, a spiralling one at that!”
Another book in my pile this Christmas was Simon Critchley’s thought provoking and experience stirring On Mysticism. I have turned to the mystics to find some support as the realisation that Vajrayana is such a tradition slowly dawns on me. I have far too much to say here, so will keep it brief and on track – that infinity loop of which I speak, an ongoing orbiting (with a flightpath that never quite traces the same place each time as described in Harvey’s work), is a search. Critchley describes how the act of ritual, or indeed creativity, is the work of de-creation. I am reminded of an image Gendlin conjures in his epic The Process Model – the fly that hits a pane of glass adjusts their trajectory until it flies to its freedom. This reminded me of times I have felt like a bee in a jam jar; when life offers us feedback to correct; and sometimes it takes many many iterations.
Ellipses are wiser than straight lines.
I’m not sure any of what I am writing will make sense – especially if one is trying to follow a non-linear, circular account with a conceptual, linear mind!
For the therapists in the reading audience, what I am moving toward here is the potentiality to mimic (if not create) these thin places in our therapy work. This dancing and holding the tension of opposites is what Jung spoke to in his transcendent function; and it opens up a portal – like the letterbox we can post the self through! I still puzzle and grapple as to how best convey this to trainees. It is not just to feel our way into this capacity for oscillating, for spiralling; it is to learn how to think WITH our bodymind, no separation. I feel grateful to have a practice like those given by the Vajrayana, the rituals within allowing to play with non-duality, live***. It is not the only way however: and I am becoming more familiar with writers, musicians and artists more generally who use the act of creation for de-creation. I personally also find it in dance, too. I have mentioned Jung, but I think Martin Buber’s work – that beyond time and space relating of the I-Thou is a way in…as this is what we are talking about here really: in the oscillation we circle and spin out of time and space altogether. Where past and future are folded into the present – beyond that even (what Chogyam Trungpa called the fourth moment, or now-ness: colleagues might know Daniel Stern’s work, and his descriptions of Kairos); and separation of subject, object collapses, the non-dual.
Why is this important and not merely to those exploring non-dual / transpersonal / spiritual approaches to therapy and living? Whatever our approach, as therapists we need to receive and feel whatever is there in the relational field: to let our clients affect us, to experience and realise our inter-depending selves…and yet (equally) for it to leave no lasting effect. As Gestalt therapist Ruella Frank urges us to see, as much as we move through the world, “the world moves through” us, too…if we can let it. Relating is a verb, and we must navigate the back and forth, contact and separation, the expansion and contraction of that murmuration.
All of this is a little Harry Potter – but running fast into the wall to board the Hogwarts Express on platform 9 3/4 is a good metaphor to run with (excuse the pun). Entering the sacred is not logical, nor a straight line: we need to learn how to dance in circles, to let go of ‘this and that’, ‘up and down’…we must learn to murmurate to find our way home.
—–
* Although as a Vajrayana practitioner, nothing is as simple as being with the breath these days
** 108 is an auspicious number in Vajrayana Buddhism, just saying
*** Simon Critchley writes beautifully to this point, explaining how use of ritual allows us to play with the impossibility of spirit and matter – emptiness and form in Buddhism – using St Julian of Norwich’s “showings” as an example of living this “the paradox of matter”